With advancement of the science and technologies, applications and services of network technologies have become widespread gradually. In order to satisfy various requirements of users on data transmissions in different service environments, various communication transmission technologies and communication standards have been developed. The worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) system is a point-to-multipoint broadband wireless accessing technology, and is one of the communication systems that have experienced rapid development in recent years.
The WiMAX system is implemented on the basis of the IEEE 802.16 series standards. According to the IEEE 802.16m standard for WiMAX, a station identification (STID) is assigned by a base station to a wireless device when a connection is to be established between the base station and the wireless device. One purpose of the STID is for use in a bandwidth request channel. When the wireless device desires to inform the base station of an uplink bandwidth required for uplink data transmission after the connection is established, the wireless device must transmit the STID thereof and bandwidth request information to the base station through the bandwidth request channel.
Because the STID has a length of 12 bits, the base station is able to recognize only up to 4096 wireless devices. As the IEEE 802.16p standard for WiMAX has also been developed, STIDs that can be assigned by the base station will be exhausted quickly if the base station is to serve both wireless devices conforming to the IEEE 802.16m standard (also known as advanced mobile stations; AMSs) and wireless devices conforming to the IEEE 802.16p standard (also known as Machine to Machine devices; M2M devices) at the same time.
Accordingly, an urgent need exists in the art to solve the problem of shortage of STIDs under the existing physical layer framework of the bandwidth request channel.